LACKADAISICAL Boris Johnson and his desperately inexperienced Cabinet are supposedly in charge yet increasingly the coronavirus health crisis is being deliberately left to the British people to manage.

There is just an empty void at the top, devoid of leadership. Johnson himself seems to have been in self-isolation since before the election.

Sports organisations had to unilaterally take decisions over event such as the London Marathon because of government inaction.

Why has the UK been operating a coronavirus strategy so different from other countries?

A decade and more of austerity has severely compromised our country’s capacity to deal with such a major health crisis.

For example, the UK has fewer intensive care beds than the majority of developed countries; beds essential for the treatment of serious coronavirus cases.

Suddenly the Government is focused on the production of ventilators to fill the huge gap in intensive care. Why was this not done months ago?

Forward planning is surely what ministers and their officials are for. Further indolence and incompetence.

Boosting private hospitals with publicly funded ventilators is deliberately undermining the NHS.

The British coronavirus strategy now is designed to use the U.K. population as a buffer, for it to absorb the effects of the virus.

They want to allow up to 80 per cent of the population to become infected so the country develops “herd immunity” for future years.

The side effect of that will be, as the prime minister said, families “will lose loved ones”.

Elsewhere in other countries those loved ones could be saved.

South Korea has tested more than 240,000 potential coronavirus cases; its fatality rate is under one per cent.

Government ministers and MPs are being awarded higher pay rises, yet they expect the biggest health care crisis in a generation to be DIY managed by the British public.

A passenger flying in from Milan, in the midst of the Italian Coronavirus outbreak,was amazed to find that the airport in Britain had no checks, no tests, not even enquiries.

Johnson is totally out of his depth, expecting British families to accept the deaths of loved ones.

Ordinary people will be the most at risk whilst Johnson’s rich cronies sidle off to cosy foreign billets, managed by highly paid medical practitioners. Why are foreign governments being so much more proactive than Johnson and his cronies? Why is Britain being allowed to drift deeper and deeper into the worst health crisis for a hundred years?

Andrew Milroy, Address supplied